Technical Field
The present disclosures relate to an image forming apparatus configured to form an image on a printing sheet in accordance with an electrophotographic image forming method. Further, the present disclosures relate to the image forming apparatus using a liftable pressing plate, which is controlled to move up and down, for a sheet feed tray. Furthermore, the present disclosures also relate to a method of controlling such a pressing plate, and a non-transitory computer readable medium storing instructions to realize such a method.
Related Art
Conventionally, there has been known an electrophotographic image forming apparatus using a pressing plate configured to move up the printing sheets accommodated in the sheet feed tray to a conveying position at which the printing sheets can be fed inside the image forming apparatus. Typically, the pressing plate is configured to be moved up by a driving formed supplied from a main motor. In such an image forming apparatus, immediately after the sheet feed tray is set to a main body of the image forming apparatus, the main motor is rotated to move up the pressing plate, a printing operation can be started quickly.
Generally, the main motor of the image forming apparatus is also mechanically connected to consumable components including photosensitive drums, fixing rollers, a developing roller, and the driving force of the main motor is transmitted to such consumable components. Because of such a configuration, when the main motor is rotated to move up the pressing plate, the other consumable components are also rotated, which may shorten the life of the consumable components.